Sierra Leone has recently emerged from a long period of political instability and civil war, and is ranked among the world’s poorest countries. Thousands of displaced people are in the process of returning totheir villages to rebuild their mainly farming-based livelihoods, and many are growing food crops for the first time in a decade.

This research report provides an in-depth understanding of many aspects of Senegalese agricultural policy, its historical impact, and more recent farmer responses to government attempts to recent farmer responses to government attempts to stimulate growth in the agricultural sector. Addressed directly are such questions as: How have farmers responded to changes in agricultural technology, prices, and marketing policies? What have been the policy successes and failures? What are the current trends in cropping productivity?

The current framework of economic growth and development includes a general trend towards the privatization of land rights and a collapse of collective structures in agriculture as well as a move towards reliance on land markets as the means of peasant access to participation in the development process. Despite the removal of land reform as an explicit part of the policy agenda, it is clear that the situations which led to the activation of land reforms in past decades are still in place.

This study examines the land acquisition and distribution process of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) by analyzing the nature and extent of participation of the various government agencies. Attempts are also made in identifying the areas where land reform can be hastened. While there are opportunities for change, the paper concludes that the overall impact of these changes on land reform may not be as large in terms of area coverage.

Paper uses a new pre-1940 Third World data base documenting real wages and relative factor prices to explore their determinants. There are three possibilities: external price shocks, factor endowment changes, and technological change. As the paper's title suggests, technological change is an unlikely explanation. The paper lays out an explicit econometric agenda for the future, although more casual empiricism suggests that external price shocks were doing most of the work, and declining-transport-cost-induced commodity price convergence in particular.

The ultimately disappointing results of past redistributive reforms caused contemporary policy-makers in Latin America to search for alternatives. In recent years, the issue of transforming tenure structure through the market mechanism has moved into the spotlight. This paper argues that it is extremely helpful to approach the topic from an institutional perspective. The institution of property rights is central to the discussion. New questions emerge: How are transactions actually being carried out in the rural setting?

For over a hundred years the zone of Kisha Beiga, in Burkina Faso, was plagued by ethnic conflicts, revolution and political anarchy. Local rivalries and administrative chaos put paid to any efforts to manage natural resources efficiently. Then, in 1991, the Burkinabe Sahel Programme (PSB) set out to quell factional rivalry and establish sustainable resource-management in the area. A fragile consensus has been achieved, but it has not been easy. Leadership conflicts, land tenure issues and administrative anomalies have threatened to derail the project.

The primary purpose of this paper is to make a contribution towards extending the coverage of this cropland tenure literature to China's extensive grasslands, which comprise some 40% of its territory.The article finds that:there are two unique characteristics of grassland tenure in this territory: group tenure arrangements and 'fuzzy' boundariesin conventional microeconomic analysis, both of these characteristics raise efficiency concernsthese concerns are only partly justified.

Manual for researchers in Southeast Asia involved in the economic evaluation of tropical forest land use options. It was developed initially to serve as an aid to Cambodian researchers in the execution of an EEPSEA-financed study of non-timber forest values in Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The aim of the manual is to provide non-specialists with a basic theoretical background to economic valuation of the environment and with a practical methodology for an economic evaluation of alternative tropical forest land uses.

Land governance and administration are critical for achieving economic growth and development in any country. It is within this context that the World Bank introduced the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) for identifying specific areas for land reform while also providing a means for monitoring.

Localization—the growing economic and political power of cities, provinces, and other sub-national entities—will be one of the most important new trends in the 21st century. Together with accelerating globalization of the world economy, localization could revolutionize prospects for human development or it could lead to chaos and increased human suffering.Improved communications, transportation and falling trade barriers are not only making the world smaller they are also fueling the desire and providing the means for local communities to shape their own future.